Good grief! It’s been nearly 50 years since A Charlie Brown Christmas first hit TV screens.

And, next year, the 65th anniversary of Charles Schulz’s first Peanuts comic strip, will be marked by a new animated movie featuring the characters.

The movie’s producers appeared on the Today Show last week and introduced the kids who will voice many of the characters.

Eerily, however, Snoopy and Woodstock will be “voiced” by the late Bill Melendez, the voice of those characters in A Charlie Brown Christmas, via sampled recordings.

A new trailer is also available (note: it says movie is coming “Next Christmas,” but the release date is actually Nov. 6)

A tie-in scheduled for next summer — many more are sure to come:

Peanuts Movie Original Graphic Novel
Charles Schulz
S&S/BOOM! Studios,  August 11, 2015
Trade Paperback
$9.99 USD

Among the titles on NPR’s just-released best books list is a title chosen by librarian Nancy Pearl, the debut novel, 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas. (RH/Crown; RH Audio).

Nancy also talks about it on her weekly Seattle NPR segment. You can hear the joy in Nancy’s voice as she describes this novel filled with “People  who are so real that you want their stories to go on and on and on — how often does that happen?” Seen through the eyes of a precocious 9-year-old wannabe torch singer, it is a “loving tribute to jazz and even more, to urban Philadelphia.”

OverDrive Sample 

The audio is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner. As the reviewer says, “Angela Goethals’s rich and resonant voice is perfectly suited to this stirring story about three characters and one important day in their lives.”

National Public Radio today published their staff selections of the best books of 2014, with a spiffy interface that allows readers to filter it in many ways (such as  “Book Club Ideas” and “Rather Long” — there is no “Rather Short,” category, however. UPDATE:  There IS a “Rather Short” category! Thanks to Margery at BCPL for pointing it out).

We’ve updated our downloadable spreadsheet, 2014-Best-Books-Childrens-and-YA-V.5 with their picks. The list now includes 280 titles selected by the Amazon Editors, Kirkus, PW, SLJ, and NPR.

Leading in total number of picks is Jacqueline Woodson’s National Book Award winning memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming (Penguin) as well as E. Lockhart’s Y.A. novel, We Were Liars. (RH/Delacorte).

There’s little consensus, however. The majority of the titles, nearly 250, were picked by just one or two sources.

Still to come is the NYT Book Review’s Notable Childrens Books, Horn Book‘s “Fanfare” titles, as well as the ALA awards, to be announced at Midwinter.

We are at work updating our adult fiction and nonfiction spreadsheets and plan to have them ready by the end of the week.

The New York Times Book Review has released its picks of the 100 Notable Books of the year,  making Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (S&S/Scribner) the top fiction title in terms of number of picks to date (see he NYT BR‘s original review). The only holdouts are the Booker committee and Publishers Weekly.

But more interesting can be the outliers. The NYT BR is the only one so far to also recognize the book the Amazon’s editors picked as the #1 title of the year, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (Penguin Press — see the original NYT BR review)

Fifteen of the fiction picks have not show up on any other lists to date. Click here to see those titles, along with links to their original reviews: NYT BR Best Books, Fiction, Unique Picks.

Both Kirkus and the Washington Post have also released their lists, so we have updated our spreadsheet:

2014-Best-Books-Adult-Fiction-V-4

By the end of the week, we will update the nonfiction spreadsheet as well.

Recommendations from librarian Nancy Pearl on her recent Seattle NPR segments:

History Through The Eyes Of Poets — Nov. 26

Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, Max Egremont, (Macmillan/FSG, 6/10/14)

Nancy recommends this title because it offers an on-the-ground view of WW I, through the eyes of the poets who were involved in it. Each chapter focuses on a year of the war, thus reflecting the changes in attitude as it grinds on.  In this 100th anniversary of the beginning of the war, she says it makes a great companion to The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell (Oxford University Press, 1975).

The Dystopian Future — Nov 18

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, David Shafer, (Hachette/Mulholland Books; Hachette Audio)

Nancy calls this first novel, “perfect for a great fast moving yet intricate account of a possible future in which a very dangerous kabal plans to take over information.”  She says it has the same “intelligence, crispness and smartness” as Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.

This month’s book pick by Costco’s influential buyer, Pennie Clark Ianniciello, featured in the Costco Connection is The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer, (HarperCollins/Ecco; hardback, 6/25/13, cover above left; trade pbk, 4/15/14, right; HarperAudio). Ironically, it not only gets the nod from the chain, independent booksellers also made it an IndiNext pick in hardcover. A further irony; Greer admits in the Costco interview that he was fired from many jobs, including one as a bookseller.

IndieNext July, 2013: “This exquisitely rendered novel captures one character in three distinct and historically significant periods: during the flu epidemic of 1918, the wartime world of 1945, and the full-blown AIDS terror of 1985. Greer manages to achieve the near impossible in making Greta believable in all three eras. Greta suffers and learns in each circumstance, though her hard-won, accumulated knowledge is of little help in solving the essential riddle that is life. Still, hers is a grand and brave journey that will not soon be forgotten.” — Marion Abbott, Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts, Berkeley, CA

It was later chosen as a New York Times Notable Book for the year.

OverDrive Sample.

The arrival of books by big names is slowing down to a trickle now that the magic “Black Friday” has passed. The only one this week is Mark Greaney’s continuation of  Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan franchise, Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect, but both the number of holds and library orders are down considerably from the heights that the Jack Ryan name once commanded.

That clears the decks for attention to some other titles you may want to recommend.

All the titles covered here, and several more notable titles arriving next week, are listed, with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar, Week of Dec. 1, 2014

Advance Attention

God’ll Cut You Down: The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a Murder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi, John Safran, (Penguin/Riverhead; Blackstone Audio)

Australian author Safran was featured on NPR’s 11/23 Weekend Edition Sunday. As the book'[s subtitle indicates, the tale is tangled and not at all what Safran expected. The NPR interview also mentions that it is very funny in parts, something one might not expect from the subject (also attested to by the blurb from John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, “Frightening and hilarious.”)

How to be both, Ali Smith, (RH/Pantheon), OverDrive Sample

This Booker shortlist title jus won the  Goldsmith Prize, for “pushing the novel into thrilling new shapes.’ The author was profiled in the New York Times on  11/25  and on NPR’s  Weekend Edition. The L.A. Times‘s lead critic David Ulin gives it a glowing review this week. Some libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering.

Independently Wealthy, Lorraine Zago Rosenthal, (Macmillan.St. Martin’s), OverDrive Sample

Kirstin Hannah calls Rosenthal a “bright new voice in women’s fiction.” A People magazine calls this sequel to the author’s New Money “delicious fun.”

Mai Tai’d Up, Alice Clayton, (S&S/Gallery, Original Trade Pbk.; S&S Audio), OverDrive Sample

People Magazine pick  12/8/14 — “Clayton’s a master at balancing heart, humor and plenty of action between the sheets.”

Best Mysteries and Thrillers

Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery, Christopher Fowler, (RH/Bantam; Recorded Books, Feb), OverDrive Sample

In the daily New York Times, by Janet Maslin calls the author’s Peculiar Crimes series “delectably droll … criminally underappreciated by the wider world”  and notes the author is “crazily prolific,”  giving readers advisors a strong backlist to mine.

The Sweetness of Life, Paulus Hochgatterer, (Quercus/MacLehose Press)

PW Best Book, Mystery/Thriller — “Hochgatterer, a child psychiatrist based in Vienna, makes his U.S. debut with this suspenseful and insightful thriller in which a child psychiatrist treats a little girl traumatized by the discovery of her grandfather’s faceless corpse in the snow outside a fairy tale Austrian town.”

Memory of Flames, Isabel Reid, Armand Cabasson, (Gallic Books Limited), OverDrive Sample

PW Best Book, Mystery/Thriller — “Lt. Col. Quentin Margont investigates a royalist plot to undermine the defenses of Paris as the allied forces advance on the city in 1814 in Cabasson’s third Napoleonic Murders whodunit. The intricate storytelling and sophisticated character development make this one of the best historical mysteries of recent years.”

Enter Pale Death, Barbara Cleverly, (Soho Press), OverDrive Sample

IndieNext Pick, Dec. — “The tales of pre-World War II Scotland Yard’s Joe Sandilands are becoming addictive. Intrigue, political manipulations, the ever-present undercurrent of class differences, and the rising spectre of Nazism run throughout the series. Joe always expected to one day wed Dorcas, a charming girl he watched grow up, and is alarmed to find that she has attached herself to her academic patron, Sir James Truelove. The detective is sent to Truelove’s family estate to investigate the death of Sir James’s wife. Murder investigations, just like true love, never run smoothly. Is Sandilands going to find the way through this snake’s nest?” — Becky Milner, Vintage Books, Vancouver, WA